Mary Bachvarova's large, complex and ambitious From Hittite to Homer Footnote ¹ argues for long-distance interactions linking the Near East to Anatolia to Greece, and constructs a model of ‘why, how, and when’ (198) those interactions operated. The general thesis is not seriously in doubt, and much of the model's detail seems plausible; but since that is beyond my competence to judge, I will stick to my remit as Greek literature reviewer and focus on what the model, if right in detail, might tell us about Greek narrative poetry. How useful is Bachvarova's speculative literary prehistory, and what is it useful for? Can it illuminate the texts we have? Referential ambiguities expose one problem. The claim that ‘the overarching plot and theme of the Odyssey speak to the values of the warrior-traders that motivated the spread of Near Eastern epic motifs’ (296) is startling: Odysseus never engages in trade; indeed, to call him a trader is a calculated insult (Od. 8.159–64). It emerges a few pages later that the reference is not to the Odyssey, but to a hypothetical original: ‘The Odyssey may have originally addressed the values of heroic trade…but as the values of the Greek aristocratic class changed and trade was viewed more negatively, the role of the hero would have lost its trader aspects’ (298). I'm not sure whether this explanation also applies to (e.g.) ‘Agamemnon rejects the interpretation of his seer, refusing to release Chryseis’ (193) or ‘it has become clear to Achilles that the gods’ intervention, the advice to avoid battle…has been at the cost of his own life’ (194). Contrast the extant Iliad, in which Agamemnon agrees to release Chryseis (1.116–17) and Achilles withdraws on his own initiative (1.169–71). These may just be inaccurate recollections of ‘the supremely sophisticated and complex works that are known to us’ (396). But to the extent that Bachvarova's interpretation of extant texts is skewed by her speculative literary prehistory, or her reconstruction of lost texts is shaped by it, the parallels are not evidence for the hypothesis but artefacts of it. Parallels per se are not, in any case, sufficient evidence of influence: Mesoamerican pyramids were not derived from Egypt. Yet Bachvarova's opening sentences jump directly from parallels to the how and why of influence (1). Is ‘negative reaction to speech’ (44) so distinctive a cultural phenomenon as to make its appearance in different narrative traditions evidence of influence? If parallels between hospitality narratives (142–5) reflect cognate hospitality cultures, why should we appeal to transmission by song to explain them? The similarities between Naram-Sin and Hector (191–5) could originate independently in any two cultures which regarded divination as a source of good advice if (as is likely) they had noticed that leaders sometimes fail to accept good advice. This is a stimulating book; but Bachvarova's approach to diagnosing influence lacks the methodological rigour of Christopher Metcalf's The Gods Rich in Praise (G&R 63 [2016], 251).

That's the first of four blockbusters in this batch of books. The second is Simon Hornblower's edition of Lycophron's Alexandra.Footnote ² Though he characterizes the poem as ‘a powerful and richly plotted literary creation’ (4), his primary interest is in its contribution to religious, social and political history: ‘Literary studies have served the Alexandra well in recent decades. It needs to be reclaimed also for history’ (113). A monograph is promised ‘which will seek to show how the historian can use the Alexandra’ (4). The 118-page introduction covers Kassandra in literature and art; sources and influences; the poem's date (c.190 bc) and place of origin (cautiously inclining to south Italy); authorship; structure; language (just half a page); foundation myths; epigraphy and cult epithets (showing how epigraphic evidence helps to elucidate the poem's obscurities); metamorphoses; influence; and the history of the text (this section by P. M. Fraser, with Hornblower's updates in square brackets). Hornblower hankers oddly after a female poet, but abandons the idea (41), speculating instead about a female performer, possibly with a male actor to introduce and close the performance (46). Since the whole text is spoken by a single male character, a male actor able to play female roles (as in classical theatre) would be a more plausible speculation. The Greek text is presented face to face with ‘a literal prose version which retains the innumerable periphrastic obscurities of naming’ (113). The commentary is placed below the text: a sensible decision at first sight, since the text's opacity demands constant recourse to exegetical support. In practice, the layout is overwhelmed by the commentary's bulk. Six pages of commentary separate lines 1140 and 1141: parallel columns of small print (the 400-word footnote on p. 478 is even tinier) expressed in compressed commentary style is not the optimum format for assimilating a 6,000-word essay. Occasionally, Hornblower himself seems to be overwhelmed by the commentary's bulk. We are warned of ‘the dangers of too ready detection of anagrams’ in 45–47n., with a cross-reference to 1440n., which says nothing about anagrams (1444n. is meant): but does the absence of such a warning in 1n. imply that the anagram is plausible, or that the anagram's anonymous advocates are not worth our attention? In 7n., on κελαίνης, there are many references but no explanation of Hornblower's conclusions (the cross-reference to 1169n. does not help); contrast the extended discussion of αἰαῖ in 31n. The exhortation ‘see below for Stes.’ (441) is less helpful than it might be in directing readers to page 448. But, to be fair, such glitches are astonishingly rare. Indisputably, ‘this monumental commentary marks a new era of scholarship on the poem; it will be the fundamental resource for all future work’ (9).

Those are the words of Charles McNelis and Alexander Sens,Footnote ³ whose assessment is immeasurably better informed than my own, since they had access to Hornblower's proofs when they were working on The Alexandra of Lycophron. A Literary Study – a very different book in genre, bulk and focus. They offer ‘a set of readings designed to foreground literary qualities that make the Alexandra not only interesting but exciting as a poem’ (vii). While Hornblower left me wholly unexcited about the poem's literary merits, McNelis and Sens succeeded at least in increasing my admiration for the poet: he is, as they say, ‘a stunningly sophisticated author’ (200). But his sophistication still failed to excite me: their discussion of Virgil's engagement with Lycophron (201–17) left me thinking how much more creative and engaging Virgil's sophistication was. Readers who want to sample the book for themselves might try Chapter 2, on imagery; the authors’ cautious subtlety is well illustrated by the discussion of alphabetization of cult titles (38–46).

In Iambus and Elegy. New Approaches, Footnote ⁴ Ewen Bowie offers confessedly ‘fragile speculations’ (31) on cultic contexts for elegiac performance. Cecilia Nobili reviews evidence for choral performance of some elegy, furthering the revolt against the ‘tyranny of the handbook’: ‘the choral/monody boundary is much more flexible than scholars have tended to allow’ (55: hurrah!). Andrea Rotstein is excellent on ancient historiography of iambus; Chris Carey, mixing metaphors, ‘maps’ the genre by ‘mining’ the minor iambic poets. Of the major talents, Archilochus receives most attention. Donald Lavigne argues that ‘the poetry of Archilochus was part of the same rhapsodic tradition as Homer’ (80), rehearsing familiar evidence for rhapsodic performance. I wondered how much difference is consistent with ‘the same’, and noted Rotsein's observation that iambos does not appear in extant agonistic records (101). Laura Lulli's paper on the ‘multiform relationship’ (194) of elegy and epic offers a more illuminating approach to Archilochus and Homer. Anika Nicolosi provides textual and exegetical notes on Archilochus’ elegiac fragments, noting inter alia ‘the astute deployment of Homeric terminology to create dynamic effects which repay repeated attention’ (189). Laura Swift, on erotic imagery, concludes that ‘Archilochus’ creativity with imagery…gives us a clear and vivid insight into what is new and imaginative about his work’ (270). Julia Nelson Haskins, observing the ‘medicalization’ of Archilochean bile in the poet's reception, diagnoses ‘proto-Hippocratic thinking’ in the poems (311). Deborah Boedeker, on Hipponax's ‘coarse poetics’, examines the techniques by which the poet constructs his ‘well-defined persona’ (70). Margarita Alexandrou, on mythological narratives in Hippponax, demonstrates that ‘his engagement with myth is more varied than we thought’ (227): more extensive, more varied in content, and ‘far more foregrounded’ (228). Tom Haskins’ paper on Hipponax's ‘Odyssean transcontextualizations’ (ugh!) makes interesting connections with visual art. David Sider examines the blurred boundary between elegy and epigram in Simonides and his reception. Antonio Aloni and Alessandro Ianucci hypothesize a ‘Solonian renaissance’ in ‘the age of Ephialtes’ (161): the evidence is thin. Christopher Brown argues that Pindar draws on martial elegy in ways that recognize its epic connection. Paula Corrêa traces the specific dependency of Plato's image in Republic 488a–489e on the Ship of Fools in Euenus 8b. Overall, this is a rewarding collection.

Readers who open Tom Phillips’ Pindar's Library Footnote ⁵ in the hope of learning about which books Pindar might have owned, or at least read, will be frustrated. Even veterans resigned to the title-as-kenning may find their patience tested by a forty-six-page introduction which contains no clear programmatic statement of the book's aims. Eventually: ‘my object is to explore the kinds of reading experience that may have confronted readers of Pindar's epinicians during [the Hellenistic] period, and how social, political and intellectual developments may have shaped contemporary readers’ approaches to these texts’ (52). The questions are interesting, but not obviously answerable: note the double ‘may have’. ‘May have’ and ‘could have’, though frequent, are outnumbered by the more confident-sounding ‘would have’ and ‘will have’: that confidence is rarely earned. Throughout, a collage of quotations and allusions occludes the author's own voice; multitudes of evasive scare quotes add to the fog. This may have worked in a doctoral thesis – a credentialing exercise addressed to a small, captive audience. It is not an optimal strategy for communicating to a larger, non-captive audience.

But it is more readable than Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy.Footnote ⁶ Mario Telò is addicted to magic words: for example, ‘materiality’ (which has the power to transmute something concrete, such as a cloak, into an abstract token), ‘performative’, and ‘proto-canonical’. This last expression is central to Telo's thesis: Wasps and the revised Clouds are proto-canonical, in the sense that they respond to the failure of Clouds I by elevating Aristophanic comedy over that of Cratinus (Wasps) and Eupolis (Clouds II) in ways that promote Aristophanes’ precedence within the later comic canon. In the space available, I cannot even to begin to summarize and dismantle the manifold implausibilities of Telò’s interpretations. I will simply observe that Ameipsias (‘who is barely known to us’ [1]) is barely mentioned, though he played a part in the relegation of Clouds I. Especially striking is Telò’s substitution of singular (‘vulgar man’) for plural (‘vulgar men’) in Clouds 524; the arbitrary suppression of Ameipsias frees Telò to present ‘vulgar comedy’ in Wasps 66 as a specific reference to Cratinus (58–9). This ‘proto-canonical’ reading of Wasps and Clouds looks to me like a post-canonical retrojection of the Horatian triad.

Boris Nikolsky is an intentionalist who, alas, insists on ‘conscious’ intention (without explaining what that means) and apparently excludes intended polyvalence (xi). So different readers will, for different reasons, deplore the methodological foundations of his approach to Hippolytus.Footnote ⁷ I have supplementary grumbles about his dismissive rejection of Aristotelian unity (xii): he assumes without argument that Hippolytus lacks unity of action; and, while it is clearly true that Hippolytus lacks ‘unity of the central character’, that is not an Aristotelian criterion of unity. Nikolsky focuses instead on ‘themes’. Though there may be many themes, ‘a meaning dominant – the theme for the sake of which the drama has been created – can be singled out in any drama’ (xiii). Hippolytus, therefore, must be ‘a harmonious…system of meanings subordinated to a single conception and aimed at expressing the main theme’. Specifically:

Thus the Grundgedanke rises from the grave. But I have seen worse thematic readings. Nikolsky has read the play carefully, and thought about it deeply; there is much in the book (for example, a painstaking discussion of Phaedra's aidōs speech) that will reward even readers as unsympathetic as I am to its hermeneutical premises.

Aristotle is also mangled in Mary Lefkowitz's Euripides and the Gods.Footnote ⁸ ‘Oedipus’ hamartia…was that he thought that he could somehow avoid the oracle’ (17): if he had thought otherwise, would his misfortune have been averted? ‘Aristotle considered anagnōrisis to be an essential feature of tragedy’ (18): for Aristotle, recognition is absent from simple plots, and is a sufficient (but not a necessary) condition for a plot being complex. That Aristotle found fault with the Aegeus scene in Medea ‘because it was not anticipated or alluded to earlier in the drama’ (162) cannot be true: he positively values the unexpected, provided that it follows causally (not ‘logically’ [164]) from preceding events (Poet. 9, 1452a3–4). (That he thinks the Aegeus scene fails this test suggests that he didn't recognize the implicit divine action that Lefkowitz detects; that may expose a blindspot on his part, and I side with Lefkowitz.) On a declamation theme in which Euripides is tried for impiety (POxy. 2400), Lefkowitz says: ‘I think it is likely that the students who took part in the exercise would have found Euripides guilty’ (56–7). But declamation students did not take the role of a judge reaching a verdict, but of an advocate arguing a case – and no competent teacher would set a declamation theme that couldn't be argued on both sides (Hermogenes Stas. 32.10–13). On tragedy, though, she is much stronger. The thesis that Euripides’ presentation of gods is ‘dramatically distinctive, but not conceptually different from that of the other surviving dramatists’ (xv) is correct and important; her arguments are generally strong; the concluding chapter, on the implications of Euripidean and other tragic codas, is particularly good.

The still youthful millennium has now produced its third commentary on Iphigenia in Tauris. L. P. E. Parker's editionFootnote ⁹ does not supersede its predecessors, by Martin Cropp in the Aris & Phillips series (2000: pedants, please forgive my rhetorically convenient millennial imprecision) and Pulheria Kyriakou (Berlin, 2006). But it makes an important and complementary addition to them. The ninety-two-page introduction is notable for an unusually wide-ranging treatment of the play's reception, and (of course) for its treatment of metre. Metre, textual criticism, and language are the commentary's most obvious strengths. The linguistic support provided for ‘readers who have studied Greek for a relatively short time’ (vii) is laudable; but finding this support in an otherwise uncompromising context will be a challenge for the intended beneficiaries. Parker barely registers the existence of Kyriakou's commentary, beyond the comment that it ‘shows good literary sense, but it may be felt as a disadvantage that the absence of a text dispenses her from having to make up her mind’ (cvi). The benefits of commitment to one of a range of uncertain possibilities are not self-evident; Parker's own commentary is the better for its consistent awareness of the limits of certainty in her constitution of the text.

Douglas Cairns’ Antigone Footnote ¹⁰ is one of the best of the Bloomsbury (formerly Duckworth) Companions. There are details that I would question. Though it is not certain that Antigone's association with Polynices’ burial was a Sophoclean invention (10: I suspect it was), we do at least know that he ignores the version in which the burial was secured by Athenian intervention: the effect of that is worth considering. Regarding Antigone's reason for returning to the body, ‘we should not make an issue of something when the text gives us no encouragement to do so’ (16); yet ‘we are encouraged further to speculate’ when Creon draws attention to Antigone's posture (17). ‘Further’ implies that we've speculated already, without encouragement; and our attention is certainly drawn to the second visit to the body – so why should that not also encourage speculation? ‘It is entirely possible that many in the original audience failed to notice’ the ‘crucial difference between [Creon's] proclamation and the Athenian treatment of traitors’ (39): true – but is it entirely likely? Why should we posit an unobservant audience here? Even so, Cairns presents with unusual clarity and precision a sophisticated analysis of the play, multi-sided and sensitive to its complexity. Moreover, Bloomsbury has repented of what I once denounced as ‘mindless vandalism’ (G&R 61 [2014], 264): the running heads in the endnotes are now fit for purpose.

Raffaella Cribiore's Between City and School Footnote ¹¹ provides a welcome expansion of the range of Libanius’ speeches available in English: twelve additions to the thirty-five in A. F. Norman's two Loeb volumes and Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture (Liverpool, 2000). Cribiore provides a general introduction; each speech has its own introduction and outline; the translations are furnished with brief notes. The introductions show signs of haste. Comments on the textual history of the speeches, in particular, are strangely inconsequential, and sometimes inaccurate. Reiske's edition is described as ‘difficult to find’ (141, 177): it can be found easily in the Internet Archive and (with slightly more effort) Google Books. Foerster is reported as saying that he ‘made fewer emendations’ in Or. 63 ‘in the absence of a good codex’ (208): puzzling, if true. But he said the opposite: saepius…ad emendandum confugiendum erat (4.386). In the introduction to Or. 35 politeuomenos is glossed as ‘cultivated person’ (155), presumably a confusion with pepaideumenos; it is correctly rendered in the translation.

The third blockbuster, Brill's Companion to Nonnus of Panopolis,Footnote ¹² comprises thirty-two papers in 754 pages, with 77 pages of bibliography and 41 pages of indices. Though I read the volume carefully enough to smile at a Hellenistic court astronomer barbarized as ‘Conan’ (508), I lack the space for a detailed assessment and the expertise for an informed one. I will say, though, that the excellent team assembled by Domenico Accorinti made me wish that I had time to read Nonnus; the paraphrase of John's Gospel, in particular, seemed likely to be more rewarding than Lycophron.

The last of the blockbusters is James Porter's The Sublime in Antiquity.Footnote ¹³ Though in this case I can claim to have some relevant expertise, here too space constrains me to be brief. In short, then: this is an important and original book. It gets many things right, offers many subtle, probing interpretations, and documents with unprecedented thoroughness an ancient tradition of things that could be designated as ‘sublime’, in one sense or another. But that qualifying phrase is crucial. The pluriformity of the sublime defeats Porter, who produces a clutter of definitions that don't define it, and formulations of the essence that it may or may not have that are vacuously broad. The thought that ‘perhaps it is best to jettison the language of the sublime altogether’ (619) would have been useful at the beginning of the book; so close to the end it is too late – and it is, in any case, only briefly entertained. The closing paragraph retreats to an unsubstantiated assertion of singularity: ‘the sublime is one…category and concept…the sublime is a concept’ (622, my emphasis). Readers who are disappointed that I have said so little should not despair: I will say more in Classical Review.